The heavy quark potential in QCD with 2 flavors of dynamical quarks

TL;DR

This paper calculates the heavy quark potential in QCD with two dynamical quark flavors using lattice simulations, finding no evidence of string breaking up to certain distances and computing a relevant scale parameter.

Contribution

It provides lattice QCD calculations of the heavy quark potential with dynamical fermions and evaluates the scale parameter r_0, extending previous studies to include dynamical quarks.

Findings

No detectable string breaking up to the probed distances.

Computed the scale r_0 for the potential.

Performed simulations with different fermion formulations.

Abstract

We compute the heavy quark potential on configurations generated by the HEMCGC collaboration with dynamical staggered fermions at $6/g^2 = 5.6$ and with dynamical Wilson fermions at $6/g^2 = 5.3$. The computations are done on $16^3 \times 32$ lattices, corresponding to physical sizes of about 1.6 and 2.3 fm, respectively. Up to the distances probed no sign of string breaking is detectable. We also compute the recently proposed scale $r_0$ defined by $r_0^2 F(r_0) = 1.65$.